Datasets for Development Economists.
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Thursday, March 5, 2009

Ethnicity of African Presidents

Updates on September 23, 2009: Raphael Franck and Ilia Rainer also collected the ethnicity of African presidents from independence to 2006, independently of Kasara. See their working paper entitled "Does the Leader's Ethnicity Matter? Ethnic Favoritism, Education and Health in Sub-Saharan Africa."

Updates on March 5, 2009: Kimuli Kasara at Columbia has made public her data on the ethnicity of heads of state around the world, including Africa, from 1960 to 2000. Check out her website.

Africa Almanac provides the ethnicity of some well-known African including presidents.

There seems to be no reliable, comprehensive dataset on the ethnicity of African presidents. Morrison et al. (1989) contains several mistakes, and also misses presidents coming into power after the mid 1980s. Kasara (2007) appears to eschew this problem by looking at the region of birth for each African president in her analysis on ethnic favoritism.

Here is my effort to collect information from various sources for an aborted research project. I define someone's ethnicity as the ethnicity of his parents. (So it's exogenous.) It's incomplete, but in case someone else is interested in collecting such information, I make it public so such a person won't waste time unnecessarily.